Seven Basic Quality Management Tools

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Seven Basic Quality tools documents

Definition of Quality Management -- it is a method for ensuring that all the activities necessary to design, develop and implement a
product or service are effective and efficient with respect to the system and its performance. It is also a principle set by the company
to endure the continuous advocacy of quality services and products, or the further improvement of it.

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Hopefully you will find some of them useful in your work. (Read articles below to learn more.)

THE JURAN TRILOGY

Brad Lewis, Bus M 463, 15 March 2006
Original
text on freequality.org

The explosion of the
field and practice of quality management can largely be attributed to a mere
handful of individuals, one of whom is Joseph Juran.Along with contemporaries Deming, Crosby,
Ishikawa, Feigenbaum, and Taguchi, Juran will be long remembered as one of the
true pioneers of quality management.While Juran’s contributions to quality management could certainly fill
volumes—and indeed do fill
volumes—this paper focuses only on Juran’s most well known contribution, the
Juran Trilogy.

The Juran Trilogy Explained

The Juran Trilogy can be thought of as strategic
framework for the implementation of quality management.While a great deal of Juran’s writing
discusses the details of specific tools and steps to improve quality in the
firm, the Juran Trilogy is the strategic reasoning that explains why all these
tools and steps are necessary.Specifically, the Juran Trilogy is comprised of three major
stages—quality planning, quality control, and quality improvement.These three stages, taken as a whole, form
the basis for the entire quality management effort.

How to Use the Juran Trilogy

To Juran and experts on quality management, the subjects
of quality planning, quality control, and quality improvement, may each fill an
entire book.Thus, a brief review of
Juran’s thoughts on these topics will have to suffice for our purposes. Quality planning is the first stage of the
Juran Trilogy and is essentially concerned with designing products and
processes that align with customer needs. According to Juran, quality planning is
comprised of the following steps:

1.Determine who your customers are. Where
customers are numerous, customers should be segmented using the Pareto
principle. This allows you to place more of your planning emphasis on your most
important customers.

2.Discover your customers’ needs. Keep in mind that your customers may have
needs that they do not voice explicitly.

3.Develop products whose features align with the
customers’ needs.Utilize tools such
as Quality Function Deployment—also known as the House of Quality—to translate
customer needs into product specifications.

4.Develop processes that are capable of
producing these products along with their accompanying features.

5.Hand these plans off to operations.
Often this entails an abrupt transition of responsibilities as the quality
planning team moves on to the next planning project.

The second stage of the Juran
Trilogy is quality control.After the
planning team hands its plans off to operations and production begins, the firm
should simultaneously take steps to ensure that its operations maintains the
level of quality that was planned for (based on the products and processes that
were designed).This is the purpose of
quality control.According to Juran,
quality control is comprised of the following three steps:

1.Evaluate actual operating performance.It is important that you know what to
measure; i.e., those dimensions that are important enough have operating goals
attached to them.Statistical tools are
very useful for evaluating operating performance.

2.Compare actual performance to operating
goals.In addition to merely
comparing, you should again use statistical tools (as well as common sense) to interpret
the meaning of any differences between performance and goals.

3.Take action in response to differences.Because your operating goals should be based
on your processes’ capabilities, you should find that any differences between
performance and goals are merely sporadic and attributable to unique,
identifiable process breakdowns. Often the corrective actions for such problems
are as simple as replacing a worn-out part or re-adjusting a machine component.

Quality improvement is the third and
final stage in the Juran Trilogy.Improvement
goes beyond control in that it allows the firm’s operations to reach levels of
quality heretofore unattainable.The
quality improvement process does this by removing the chronic quality problems
that were built into the products and processes in the planning process. Additionally, the organizational learning that
occurs during quality improvement efforts—the “lessons learned”—should be taken
into account and utilized, where applicable, in future quality planning.According to Juran, quality improvement
includes the following steps:

1.Establish
the infrastructure needed to facilitate continuous quality improvement.This step should include the formation of a
standing Quality Council whose responsibility it is to ensure that quality
improvement efforts receive sufficient attention, effort, and resources.

2.Identify
specific improvement projects.The
Quality Council should consult employees, customers (via market research), and
cost-of-poor-quality data in identifying potential projects.If this is your firm’s first quality
improvement project, the Council should select a project that has a high chance
of success, deals with a significant and perhaps long-neglected problem, and is
easily measurable in terms of results.Subsequent projects should be selected on the basis of the expected
financial return on investment, the urgency of the problem, the amount of the
potential improvement, and so forth.

3.For
each project, establish a team that is clearly charged with the responsibility
of bringing a successful resolution to the project.At a minimum, the following departments
should be represented on the team:

·Theailing departments – the departments
most adversely affected by the problem.

·The
suspect departments – the departments generally believed to be the source of
the problem.

·The
remedial departments – the departments most likely to be able to solve the
problem.

·The
diagnostic departments – the departments with the resources to diagnose the
problem.

4.Provide
project teams with the necessary training, resources, and motivation to
successfully complete the project.

An Example of the Juran Trilogy at Work

Figure 1 offers a graphical example of the Juran Trilogy
that will be explained here. Before operations begin, the example firm shown
here performs the first stage in the trilogy, quality planning.Thus, before operations begin, the planning
team identifies the firm’s customers, assesses their needs, and develops a
product that meets those needs and processes capable of producing the product.When operations for this product begin, the
firm initially experiences a relatively high defect rate hovering just above 20
percent. This defect rate, as it turns out, is what the firm plannedfor by way of the product features and processes it developed. In
the meantime, the firm practices quality control by attempting to maintain the
status quo in terms of quality. The firm shown here experiences a “spike” in
its defect rate, and it is the quality control team that deals with this
sporadic occurrence, solves the problem, and brings the defect rate back into
the zone of control.At some point
during this process’s operations, the firm’s

Quality Council decides to
target this particular process for quality improvement efforts due to its high
level of “chronic waste”—quality problems built into the process during the
planning stage.Following the
improvement steps discussed previously, improvement project team successfully
diagnoses and remedies the source of the chronic waste.The result is a breakthrough in quality
improvement.The defect rate drops
sharply—not in a sporadic fashion, but in a permanent fashion—until it begins
to hover around its new baseline (about five percent, in this case).Thus, this process has reached a new, much-improved
zone of quality control.The quality
control stage is ongoing, so the quality control team continues to maintain the
process’s status quo, albeit a “new” status quo.Lastly, the firm utilizes a system of
organizational learning to capture the lessons that were learned during the
improvement stage.Future planning teams
will be able to take advantage of this learning in the future to develop
processes that contain less chronic waste to begin with.

For More Information / Bibliography

The following sources contain a great deal of information
on the Juran Trilogy, statistical tools, and/or Quality Function Deployment (or
House of Quality).These sources also
constitute my bibliography for this paper: